Despite many in our midst downplaying the role of experts in our society, the truth is that we thrive because people have mastered so many different skills and abilities. We do what we enjoy or do best and we outsource those things we do not want to attempt to them with full confidence that they …
In March 2020, economic and social life across America ground to an abrupt halt as the country attempted to slow the spread of COVID-19. In the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression, twenty-two million people lost their jobs in the first few months of 2020. And yet somehow the finances of most Americans improved …
The January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was at once an end-the culmination of long-simmering strain of violent American extremism–and a beginning. In effect, it’s the origins of a new war on democracy by a fundamentally antidemocratic far-right movement that, cynically and ironically, calls itself a ‘”Patriot” movement. They are anything but, according …
Mankind has been fascinated by this question since we began conjuring up big thoughts about things around us and things unseen, but imagined. Today the search for the answer to that question seems to have intensified beyond ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcasts and classic Star Trek episodes. The government has developed new agencies to legitimize …
What happens when an optimist asks the question ‘what will the world that I leave to my 19 year-old daughter look like when she’s my age in 2063?’ When it’s put in the observant and skillful hands of a man who has been recognized for changing the face of nature writing after twenty five years …
By revisiting her mother’s central role in helping write and push through the first anti-abortion bill in America in New York State, our guest Felicia Kornbluh , author of “A Woman’s Life is a Human Life” has a unique perspective on where the fight for reproductive rights goes from here, now that it falls to …
It’s fitting that we post this podcast on the 4th of July, as we ask what we can do for our country at a time when it is facing numerous challenges within and without. Ted Hollander has been leading a one man crusade through his Step Forward America! effort for a National Service program …
Extremists come in many forms. Some carry a weapon. Others carry around a myth that can be just as harmful. While in their previous best-selling book “Merchants of Doubt” Naomi Oreskes and our guest, Erik Conway, explained how four physicists laid the groundwork for climate change denial by arguing against government regulation, in their …
To hear a great historian of America’s early history come to the realization that America’s victory over the British in the Revolutionary War was second to its defeat of the scourge of smallpox at the time is pretty stunning. Then he makes a compelling case that the virus had to be conquered in order to …
The term feminist has been maligned by both the right and the left, for different reasons, even though the concept of equality for women is a generally accepted principle and one that many women, no matter their politics, fought to insure. The ideas of feminism were first articulated by women personally involved in the …